Cipher Mysteries

Some days I wonder if I should forget all about cipher mysteries - which are, quite frankly, far too much like hard work - and instead start up a news feed that promises subscribers one thing and one thing only: a freshly hatched cracked Leonardo da Vinci theory every day. But even if such a tragic nadir of historical non-journalism ...

What would it feel like to be a footballer with no goal? An actor with no stage? A projector with no screen? Or (finally getting to the point) a pseudohistorian with no infamous historical figure to attach his/her nutty theories onto? All of which is why I feel sorry for poor old Leonardo da Vinci. He barely counts as a genuine ...

Once again, Leonardo da Vinci has been in the news. Firstly, a local journalist found a fragment of Leonardo's writing in Nantes library, which had received it in 1872 along with 5,000 other documents (including an unknown Mozart score) from "wealthy collector Pierre-Antoine Labouchère". It hasn't yet been transcribed or translated, so I couldn't possibly comment on whether it ...

You may have heard the curious story from May 2008 about how Sotheby's withdrew a picture from auction that was suspected of having been optically captured by Thomas Wedgwood in the 1790s, some 30 years before the first 'official' photo was taken. Photography historian Dr Larry J. Schaaf speculated that this was so "based on the letter 'W' that – ...

OK, much as I deplore the relentless, adulatory stripmining of Leonardo da Vinci's works, I do rather enjoy seeing infra-red images of paintings, glimpsing the construction marks left beneath the surface. And so I have nothing but good things to say about Discovery News' series of infra-red images of Leonardo's "Adoration of the Magi". I like the detailing on the ...

The next European Skeptics Conference starts in Budapest in a few days' time (17th-19th September 2010), and features Klaus Schmeh giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript. Though Klaus has invested a lot of effort into building up a hardline skeptical position on VMs theories (basically, that more or less everything written on it is either pseudoscience or pseudohistory), I personally don't ...

Somewhere during the last decade, historians picked up got the idea that history book publishers wanted to be pitched 'vertical' books about individual microsubjects, books that somehow try to recapitulate the last N-thousand years of human history as viewed through the narrow prism of, say, salt or swearing or codpieces. All of which somehow reminds me of the joke about the ...

Just a quick note on Voynich cipher cribs. Even though I've built up a fairly substantial set of (what I think are) reasonably pragmatic deductions about how Voynichese works, actually finding any way to use those to get at the rest has (perhaps unsurprisingly) proved difficult. To recap, I suspect that... "4o" steganographically codes for "lo" (and perhaps "la" as well, via some subtle letter formation ...

Giancarlo Truffa recently posted a link to the HASTRO-L mailing list that contains a mention of a surprising claim that Leonardo da Vinci apparently designed a telescope:- On page 59(b) of Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus appears this drawing. Bülent Atalay proposed in 2005 that it is Leonardo’s “telescope”. The page also contains a “study of light reflection of a concave mirror”. And ...

An intriguing email just arrived on Cipher Mysteries' virtual doormat: recent blog subscriber Anna Castriota (thanks for writing, Anna!) asks whether I think there is any sign of filigree in the Voynich Manuscript. Of course, as per normal with the VMs, the answer is a "tentative maybe". There are good grounds for believing that its author had been exposed to an eclectic range ...